How Downtown Voted in the 2024 Presidential Election
Anyone who fears (or hopes) that voters south of Canal Street are becoming more conservative will find little basis to discern a tectonic shift in the results of the recent presidential election. Such analysts may, however, detect a small (but significant) adjustment in the ideological outlook of local residents.
For the purposes of this evaluation, Lower Manhattan will be defined as the area falling within the boundaries of Community District 1 (CD1), a conglomerate of neighborhoods encompassing 1.5 square miles, bounded roughly by Canal, Baxter, and Pearl Streets, and the Brooklyn Bridge. This zone is further divided into 31 separate election districts.
Based on data aggregated by the New York City Election Atlas, this area saw a turnout of 24,845 voters in November. That represented a 9.1 percent decline from the 27,336 local ballots cast in the 2020 presidential race.
On the whole, this population of affluent, educated residents conformed to the pattern of demographically similar voters nationwide. They supported the Democratic ticket by a wide margin. But as with peers around the country, they did so by a margin than was less wide than the same trend four years ago.
In the 2024 election, the Democratic ticket of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz garnered 19,358 votes, or 77.9 percent of the Lower Manhattan total. This was a decline of 6.7 percentage points from four years earlier, when the Democratic ticket of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris earned 84.6 percent of all votes (or 23,138 ballots).
The Republic ticket of Donald Trump and J.D. Vance took 5,487 local votes this year, or 22.1 percent of all ballots recorded. This is a significantly bigger total than the G.O.P. garnered Downtown in the last election, both in terms of the absolute number of votes (4,198 in 2020) and the relative proportion of all ballots (15.3 percent of total in 2020).
In terms of hyper-local partisan distinctions, the Trump-friendliest neighborhood in Lower Manhattan is the South Street Seaport, where the Republican ticket took 25.2 percent of all votes. The most Democratic-leaning appears to be Tribeca, where the Democratic ticket took 81 percent of all ballots.